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Western New York’s Tea Party is as horrible electorally as it is with respect to policy. They lost yesterday, and they lost big.

Carl and the Conservative Fusion Party

This tea party crowd, which accuses everyone who doesn’t think like they of being “sheeple”, circulated a list of Conservative Fusion Party candidates for whom to vote, without explanation or argument. Just a straight “C” ticket. There is no thought there, just blind following and demands of ideological purity. Politics is, at its heart, a game of compromise. When you foreclose that possibility, you’re bad for America, and you’re going to lose, sooner or later.

Astorino’s WBEN-Mentum

Local delusional hate radio, which was so deep in the tank for Astorino that it became self-parody, spent all afternoon yesterday using callers to its own radio shows as a representative sample of the electorate. It claimed that Cuomo suffered from an enthusiasm gap, and predicted a wild and unexpected win for its chosen candidate. Last week, during what’s supposed to be the straight morning news program, Astorino’s daily schedule was a news item. Cuomo’s schedule was not given equal time.

WBEN is not “NewsTalk” or “News Radio” or, God help us, the “Voice of Buffalo”. It is a right-wing talk radio station; Limbaugh & his clones, all day. It’s not even the official organ – the Komsomolskaya Pravda– of the Republican Party anymore, having firmly aligned itself with Lorigo’s Conservative Fusion Party and the tea party. Everything that this crew falsely accuses the Buffalo News of being, it is.

Weppner is the very embodiment of the low-information talk-radio caller / Buffalo News commenter who regurgitates Twitchy and Fox News talking points. Her wealth and shamelessness enabled her to mount what was, in the end, a nasty and whiny vanity campaign. Maybe at least she can now return all of her radio and blog archives back online for everyone to read.

Panepinto & The Law of Unintended Consequences

Did you need more evidence of how – despite their deep gun fetish – the tea party can’t shoot straight?

It rejected Republican Mark Grisanti and instead backed Kevin Stocker. Stocker rejected the tea party – its titular head Rus Thompson especially. So, the tea party’s own candidate rejected them, they had burned all their bridges with the establishment’s Grisanti, and all of this led to a Panepinto win and a Democratic pickup in the state Senate.

Great job, guys! Congratulations, Marc Panepinto!

Republican Pickup in Cheektowaga

Paladinocrats Lose

You don’t go from being a Paladino stooge one day to being a Democrat the next. Johnny Destino was a homophobic Paladino stooge a couple of years ago, and ran this year as an endorsed Democrat. The voters rejected him.

In NY-27, Jim O’Donnell was MIA. He complained that he couldn’t raise money, but that didn’t stop others from doing it for him, but he refused. What really irked me was that he was rude or dismissive to people who offered to help him out. He was prone to outbursts of anger, and simply didn’t bother to do even the free, little things that could have earned him some free media – or at least a Facebook share.

We also learned on Sunday that O’Donnell was an aide for the 2010 Paladino campaign. If you’re going to strike out in politics, and you scan all the races available to help out, and you land on the homophobic promoter of racism and pornography, don’t come asking Democrats for support without disclosure and vocal rejection. I wrote my own name in for NY-27, but perhaps for the first – likely last – time, I wished Team Collins good luck. At least Collins is honest and consistent about where his loyalties lie.

“If you’re loving your Obamacough…if you’re loving that respiratory infection, it’s not a mystery – it comes from Obama’s children. If you’re enjoying that, why don’t you call Brian Higgins’ office and thank him for it, and ask if he’ll help pay your medical bills for whatever your doctor may have given you to counteract said cough.”

What is he talking about? What does this mean? What “Obamacough” did “Obama’s children” cause people in WNY to contract? Why should Brian Higgins pay for anyone’s medical bills, given that everyone in New York is mandated to have health insurance coverage nowadays either through their employer, through the exchange, or through Medicaid?

In what way is this responsible? What sort of radio station is this, exactly, this WBEN? I mean, I get Bauerle saying any old oddity – that’s his job – but when it crosses the line from commentary into crackpot tin-foil hattery, doesn’t someone step in and do something about it?

Eliminationist radio station WBEN spent an entire day Wednesday lamenting / concern-trolling the President’s apparently impeachable offense of saluting Marines with a coffee cup in his hand. Of course, because he’s Obama, it was a latte. But while Tim Wenger’s obsession du jour was n0bummer’s epic disrespect of every troop and all troops everywhere, what sort of thing has WBEN (and the rest of the local media, for that matter), completely ignored?

Or how about WBEN’s afternoon drive time shock jock dreaming – literally – of a military coup in Washington, and his idiot commenters trying to out-do each other with eliminationist wet dreams. (Helpful hint: the page is publicly viewable, so don’t whine to me about not blocking the names out.

That’s some station Tim Wenger has molded into his own image. So, while it’s a daylong horror for Obama – a civilian – to salute Marines whilst holding a coffee cup, it’s perfectly ok to make political hay off American martyrs and to openly advocate for and dream of sedition, treason, and a coup d’etat. Clear?

Not to put too fine a point on it all, but what’s going on along the US-Mexican border is unprecedented – youngsters are crossing into the US en masse and rather than running from Border Patrol in order to get further into the US, they are surrendering immediately upon arrival, just like the Cubans do under our unusually generous “dry foot” policy.

(Hint: Just tell the wingnuts that these kids are from Cuba, and maybe they’ll treat them as human beings.)

These children and their families are being taken advantage of by con artists. They are the tired, the poor – the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Tempest-tost wretched refuse, these children and their families are naive victims. Yet when they come here, our nativist right wing freaks out. Peak temper tantrum, hurling hateful invective not only at these Central American tweens, but at Obama, the liberals, and everyone else who doesn’t slap a Gadsen flag on their bumper and an eagle on their timeline.

It is a humanitarian crisis because these children come with nothing – have nothing – and because ours is a country of laws, we are not empowered simply to shove them back on a bus across the Mexico border. We have due process. We have laws. We have to detain them – humanely – while we process them all. That is how a 1st world country works, and that is what the law requires.

While the wingnuts with all that extra time on their hands accost kids on their way to the Y, other kids are dying. The border patrol is a law enforcement agency – not a refugee non-profit. The government is unprepared to deal with something like this, because of its massive scale and the unprecedented nature of what’s going on. Washington alternates between grandstanding and dithering.

By treating these kids as “invaders” and an “army”, you dehumanize them as well as any World War II-era cartoon of a bespectacled, slanty-eyed Tojo. By focusing on blaming Obama rather than trying to solve a legal and humanitarian crisis, the right wing contributes not only to the further erosion of whatever was left of its Latino support, but exposes itself for the craven practitioner of racialist, nativist politics that it’s become in recent years.

At the local forefront of this racial animus is hate radio WBEN, led by right-wing kook and operations director Tim Wenger.

Sometime on Tuesday, this appeared at WBEN’s scat-strewn Facebook page:

I won’t link to either one, but if you go to “Mad World News”, it seems that some nosy hausfrau encountered a busload of brown-skinned people getting off a school bus at a Wal-Mart in rural North Carolina. She tried to communicate with them, but these durn Messikinz didn’t speak any English. So, she simply leaped to the conclusion that, because one of them had managed to communicate with her that they were recent arrivals to America, they must be “illegals”. Not only that, but our brave Mexican-whisperers concluded that this busload of “invaders” was paying for its Wal-Mart goodies with “EBT cards”; welfare handouts.

They weren’t paying with welfare cards. Their wages are paid to rechargeable debit cards, which they used to buy items for themselves at Wal-Mart in rural North Carolina.

They weren’t on a government bus, but were instead being transported by their employer to the Wal-Mart for a shopping trip.

But, you know, brown people on a bus using plastic at a Wal-Mart. Because right wingers instinctively think the worst of everyone and everything, these had to be (what else?) “illegal” “invaders” spending welfare EBT cards thanks to Obama inviting them to the US.

In the meantime, the administration and Democrats will try to find a humane and legal solution to this problem while the Republicans continue to antagonize Latino voters and Millenials. In the meantime, sane and rational people will call out wildly horrible local hate radio for the embarrassment it is.

Not every problem is one that needs to be solved with hatred and guns.

Over the next week, consider for a moment that the radio station that brings you the traffic and weather together in the morning, along with a roster of commentators whose extremism builds as the day rolls along.

But in the last few months or so, the station’s operations director, Tim Wenger, has developed for himself something of a largely off-air personality. In some ways, it’s even more malignant than that of his top talkers. He conducts himself like the most deluded and hateful trolls on the WBEN Facebook page.

No, actually, I’ve never felt like “throwing a shoe” at any American political figure. Mostly because I’m not a violent moron, but also because I feel secure enough in the political system and in debate and discussion that “throwing a shoe” or otherwise committing an assault and battery doesn’t enter into it. Remember when an Iraqi reporter threw a shoe at President Bush? Did Wenger think that was acceptable? Reasonable? Rational?

I didn’t think it was persuasive or appropriate. People enter politics, and they should expect to be vetted, scrutinized, and questioned. They should not expect to dodge physical assault. They do not deserve battery – no matter how much you disagree with them. For everyone who thinks Hillary Clinton deserves to be hit by a shoe because of Benghazi, I can probably find you two who think that Bush should be behind bars for war crimes.

So, there’s nothing at all funny or appropriate about someone throwing a shoe at George Bush or at Hillary Clinton. Anyone who thinks differently is no different from a fascist blackshirt, trying to do with violence what they can’t do with words. It is beyond un-American.

The video Wenger loves shows a small handful of protesters minding their own damn business. They had in no way attacked, provoked, or otherwise antagonized the two servicemen who attacked them. You can see in the last few frames, one protester with his hands to his side – he’s asking to reason with them.

In response, they curse at him – this from Tim Wenger, who just can’t tolerate the profane blogs. It’s ok to say “fuck” if you’re a Marine intimidating, assaulting, battering, and robbing a couple of guys on a moped.

That protest, by the way, took place in Albuquerque. The people on the moped were protesting an epidemic of police brutality in that city, culminating in the homicide of an unarmed homeless man. The people on the moped were exercising their right to free speech, protesting police shootings. Their use of an upside-down flag wasn’t an act of disrespect – the upside-down flag is a distress signal, used in many protests as political speech indicating that the republic is in danger. Go look at the title card for “House of Cards”. Should belligerent and ignorant young men throw shoes, perhaps, at TVs displaying it?

There is nothing to love about what that Marine does to the protester, whether he’s an “ass” or not. (More profanity! Shock! Horror!). Engaging in street fights with political opponents is what the blackshirts and brownshirts did in the 20s and 30s. That is the only context within which this assault and robbery of a flag can be viewed. The only lens through which we can see this as acceptable or lovable behavior is the lens of fascism.

So, understand that Buffalo: the guy who runs operations for the Entercom corporation locally is a proponent of violent, fascist behavior. He is an outspoken, unabashed fan of violence and intimidation for political ends. To say this is un-American is a dramatic understatement. But even more insidious is that – whether he holds these views sincerely or not – he is encouraging that sort of behavior from the malinformed people listening to WBEN who think Michael Savage is too liberal.

Tim Wenger and WBEN are encouraging violence against people who hold different political views from them. I don’t know why this is not a big deal.

If this was happening in the 1930s, this newsreel would be appropriate:

One of the goals of gun control advocates is to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill; like kids who go on stabbing sprees or shooting sprees. There’s a big difference between the two – in Pennsylvania, no one died.

2. Many people are calling for better mental health services in this country in the wake of the Pennsylvania stabbing, the Sandy Hook shooting, and the Fort Hood shooting. That would be fantastic – oftentimes the first thing that state and municipal governments cut and shrink to balance their budgets are the very costly mental health services offered to people who desperately need – yet can’t afford – them. When services are cut and facilities closed, where do you think they go? How do you think they function in society? The mentally ill are, furthermore, often uniquely unable or unwilling to stand up for themselves, their medical needs, and their rights.

I think it’s a great goal for society to better serve our most vulnerable. It’s sort of the point of programs like SNAP and WIC, and mental health services need to be taken more seriously. Of course, this costs money. So, let’s agree to expand mental health services while simultaneously not complaining about the cost of doing so, or denigrating the mentally ill recipients of these services because we resent them receiving them.

Furthermore, mental health services should be available to anyone who needs them, on demand and for life. The best way to accomplish this is to expand mental health coverage throughout the health insurance spectrum.

3. At Fort Hood, a troubled soldier shot three people and injured 16 others. The right wing – locally led by the increasingly shrill and dangerous operations director at WBEN (see below) – has recommended that soldiers at the facility be allowed to carry sidearms at all times to protect themselves against a deranged shooter. Is that a good way to run a society – by encouraging shootouts? Have we not progressed at all since the post-civil war frontier times? These men and women have signed up to serve our country. We can’t trust our servicemen and women to not shoot at each other? Nowhere is 100% safe all of the time, and it’s ridiculous to live your life waiting to fend off an attack. Everybody’s Chuck Norris, all of a sudden. Just relax. You don’t need a gun all the time.

4. Kathy Weppner changed her campaign website yesterday and touted it on Facebook and Twitter. It looks like a 12 year old was let loose on a Livejournal account. Weppner is going to run against Obamacare, which is interesting since it’s expanded health insurance so that the number of uninsured is at its lowest point in years. It’s also interesting since more people with health insurance means more patients for her husband to treat.

The next report will be on the economy, jobs and Obamacare job loss. This landmark legislation has been changed 40 times. The chaos, uncertainty and cost of this massive piece of legislation and last minute changes has resulted in thousands of job cuts, reduction in fulltime employment, and employer fear of hiring. The cumulative impact of Obamacare, on top of the highest corporate taxes in the world, and constant Washington interference is devastating to our small business job creators. Obamacare, as it impacts the medical care you receive, will appear as a separate report.

And you thought she was just a benign kook. She has no idea what she’s talking about, and is simply vomiting up Fox News/Rush Limbaugh talking points.

That protester didn’t do a damn thing to those Marines. He didn’t attack them or disrespect them (an upside-down flag is a distress signal, (36 USC §176(a)), not a sign of disrespect to the flag or to those who fight under her). Furthermore, whatever that protester was doing is protected political speech. What that Marine did to the protester is simple assault & battery; also, larceny. Robbery, possibly. That sort of intimidation and assault of someone with whom you disagree is straight up fascism.

Kathy Weppner (R-Clownshoes) is busy getting her campaign in order. She’s had a rough go of it so far, what with her diligent work scrubbing all evidence of her words, deeds, and thoughts from every corner of the internet because practically every bit of it is so delightfully cringeworthy.

Campaigns have to designate someone to be a treasurer. It’s an important task, marrying the complexities of federal campaign finance regulation, filing requirements, transparency, and math. Mrs. Weppner has appointed a David Lipinoga to be her campaign treasurer.

Lipinoga is an Amherst Republican Committee member who has developed a game for mobile phones. It’s a blatant and unapologetic rip-off of the wildly fun and popular “Angry Birds” game, but instead of birds you launch “patriots” at shaky structures that also feature images of people whom Lipinoga believes to be enemies of the “patriots”. He calls them “pinheads”. The game doesn’t appear to be available on the Apple App Store, but it is available for Android devices at a cost of 99 cents. The game description indicates that it was…

…developed with the use of physics, animation, adventure and political parity. The game’s functionality utilizes the touch screen-base technology of the tablet world. Players use a Revolutionary War cannon to launch patriotic characters or the “Angry Patriots” at socialist politicians, actors, musicians, other mainstream pinheads as well as a variety of “jack asses” stationed throughout the board. As players advance through the game, new patriots appear, some with special abilities that can be activated by the player.

20% of the proceeds go directly to MCLEF. MCLEF raises funds to help offset the college tuition costs for children who have lost a parent defending our county or in the line of duty.

The game is a direct rip-off of Angry Birds, complete with caricatures of supposed “socialists” that look like something a 12 year-old did for free using Microsoft Paint and a broken mouse.

Via Facebook.com

The American way isn’t to take something great, copy it wholesale, and make it awful.

Lipinoga’s corporate partner, Keith Marshall was a debt collector sued in 2009 by then-Attorney General Andrew Cuomo for unfair debt collection practices. Marshall ran a debt collection scam with two other Buffalo men that was so abusive that it racked up 850 consumer complaints with the Better Business Bureau, as well as state and federal consumer protection authorities. They stand accused of threatening debtors with imprisonment and physical harm if they didn’t make payment arrangements. When rebuffed, Marshall’s employees would hurl vicious verbal abuse and make obscene sexual comments at people who, in some cases, owed as little as a few hundred dollars. One of Marshall’s operations is featured at “RipoffReport.com“.

Cuomo’s office uncovered that Marshall’s collectors would demand payment for debts that didn’t exist, and they would sometimes inflate the amounts owed. They would pretend to be law enforcement to frighten and humiliate people. One collector threatened to rape a purported debtor’s daughter, using her name. Collectors routinely called consumers “drunks,” “scumbags,” “deadbeats,” and, in one instance, “a low-life piece of trash.”

To learn more about the game that Lipinoga developed, here are some images of characters and gameplay (all via Facebook.com).

The images speak for themselves.

We’re well aware of Weppner’s penchant for birtherism and her aversion to human sexuality. But you are also known by the company you keep.

Kathy Weppner and her campaign team can associate with whomever they want. They can associate with unfair debt collectors and birthers, they can spread half-baked propaganda about “socialism” and equate people with Karl Marx. No one says they can’t. But when you run for federal office, you should take the clown shoes off – not make them bigger and brighter. If you want to be an elected representative of the people in Washington, you can’t base your campaign on lies, and misrepresentations that are easily debunked by a common website. You shouldn’t run away from the hatreds and insecurities that you worked so hard to cultivate and profit from for a decade, either. Doing so will make you look opportunistic and false.

I contacted Lipinoga via Facebook to find out how much the app has donated to MCLEF. I have not yet received a response.

When you apply for a job, do you expect the company to blab about it publicly on social media? There’s no law preventing it, nor does Entercom promise confidentiality – after all, it has to vet the information provided. But certainly it crosses some sort of blatant ethical line for Wenger to try and humiliate Potter in a public forum in response to a harmless joke. There’s a real ominous mean-spiritedness behind that.

Oh, and on top of all that – it’s a lie.

Potter didn’t apply for a job with WBEN. He was, at one point, offered a job as a producer for WGR. Although WGR and WBEN are both Entercom stations, WGR doesn’t offer an “all paranoia, all the time” format. Take a look again at Wenger’s Tweet – he alleged that Potter applied to WBEN – not Entercom or WGR. Furthermore, he didn’t apply, he was courted.

Luckily for Potter, WEDG was aware of his talks with WGR, so his livelihood is not threatened. But Wenger didn’t know that, and he deliberately, knowingly published a false statement of fact in order to embarrass a guy from a competing station who made a tame joke.

It’s malicious libel.

@J_Potter Love it. Take it to the sewer with the rest of the bloggers Josh as only the edge can do! Enjoy it down there.

Radio is a competitive medium, and I love a good media war as much as anyone, but intentionally making a false and defamatory statement – information which, if true, should remain confidential – in order to embarrass someone who made a joke is wildly inappropriate and completely beyond the pale.

Wenger can demean the blogosphere all he wants. Sure, we use poopy and potty and peepee words here. But he should check his own behavior before calling any other medium the “gutter”.